So when it came time to swap out a previous long-standing exhibit, museum curator Mary Ryan said it was the perfect time to bring a number of artifacts and stories out of the museum's archives and into an exhibit that could introduce the public to more details about the Navy's little-known undersea vehicle programs.

That exhibit was unveiled on Sept. 14 alongside a revamped family learning area that seeks to introduce even the youngest museum visitors to aspects of the Navy's undersea operations.

"We've never had comprehensive interpretation about undersea vehicles," Ryan said. "This exhibit really gives us an opportunity to really talk about something that's an important subject and an important part of our mission that we were only touching on with the outdoor submersibles."

Visitors to the museum will be introduced to the different types of Navy undersea vehicles — including submersibles, remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles — and they will be able to explore how the development and usage of that technology has expanded the Navy's capability to respond to certain mission types.

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Volunteer Harry Gilger, a Navy submarine veteran, views for the first time the new exhibit at the Keyport Naval Undersea Museum. On the right is a vase with sediment from the resting site of the USS Scorpion, which sank in 1968.(Photo: Larry Steagall / Kitsap Sun)

"Undersea vehicles expand Navy abilities," Ryan said. "A lot of the missions that undersea vehicles do today were once impossible, or difficult or inefficient or dangerous for the Navy to do, and undersea vehicles have made them possible, safer and they've optimized them."

One of the most challenging aspects of putting the new exhibit together was to take the technically complicated subject of undersea vehicles and present it in an understandable format, Ryan said.

"Every kind of vehicle has to have some kind of power source, every vehicle has to have a way to move through the water, a way to control its movements, so this was our simplified way of talking about undersea vehicles," Ryan said.

While all three types of undersea vehicles are self-propelled, they're all operated through different methods.

Submersibles, which are no longer used by the Navy, were piloted by sailors located inside of the vessel. Remotely operated vehicles, shortened to ROVs, are essentially robots controlled by human operators through a tethered cable, and their operators carry out their mission through direct control of the vessel. Autonomous underwater vehicles, shortened to AUVs, are robots that are programmed to carry out their mission without any guidance or interference from human operators.

All three types of vessels can be equipped with different types of sensors and tools to carry out a variety of tasks, such as search and recovery, recording or live streaming video from the depths, producing photographs or audio recordings, performing physical tasks with mechanical arms or collecting samples for scientific research.

Most importantly, the new exhibit not only brings the different eras of the Navy's undersea vehicle program to life, but it also emphasizes the importance of the engineers, operators, sailors and analysts who made the program successful, Ryan said.

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A cable cutter for a mine neutralization vehicle is part of the new undersea vehicles exhibit at Keyport's Naval Undersea Museum.(Photo: Larry Steagall / Kitsap Sun)

"Even though this exhibit is about the incredible technology, we wanted to make sure that visitors understood the importance of the people in every step of the undersea vehicle operations," Ryan said. "People invent the vehicles, they build the vehicles, they pilot the vehicles, they program them, they maintain them, they study the data, they apply the data, so as wonderful as this technology is, and as much as it does for the Navy, without people you couldn't have any of it."

Perhaps one of the most notable artifacts on display at the museum is a jar of seafloor sediment donated by a sailor who was onboard the submersible that surveyed the wreckage of the USS Scorpion after it was lost at sea, Ryan said.

"In 1969, our Trieste II went down and surveyed the wreckage of USS Scorpion, and some of the sediment from the seafloor got caught in the feet of Trieste, and so when they came back up to the surface, the pilot, Anthony Dunn, scraped that sediment off," Ryan said. "To have something that symbolizes such a significant loss for the submarine community, it's very meaningful for us to have that and put it on display."

The museum, located at 1 Garnett Way next to Naval Base Kitsap-Keyport, is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m with free admission. Starting in October, the museum will be closed on Tuesdays.

The museum will also be hosting a special event on Nov. 3 where the public can get a closer look at the unmanned undersea vehicles the Navy uses today, brought over from the Navy's first unmanned undersea squadron, which is based at Naval Base Kitsap-Keyport. The event will feature the latest technology with the sailors who operate it.